5 Simple Tricks to Reach the Inbox

laura
Industry
April 20, 2016

I saw a post over on LinkedIn today. It was from an ESP, talking about their simple tips and tricks for getting into the inbox. The laughable bit was half the “tricks” had nothing to do with getting to the inbox, but rather were about enticing people to open the mail once it’s gotten to the inbox.
There are no “tricks” to getting to the inbox. There used to be some tricks. But the ISPs figured them out and protect against them.

Complaint lowering tricks

For instance, you could create hundreds or thousand of free accounts and pad your mailing list with them. Voilà! Low complaint rates. Inbox Forever!
ISPs figured that out and it stopped working.
Then you’d create hundreds or thousands of free accounts, log into them and move mail from the spam folder to the inbox. Voilà! Users want our mail! Inbox Forever!
ISPs figured that out, and even sued a couple people for doing it.

Bounce lowering tricks

One of the newer tricks to get to the inbox is the use of list cleaning or list hygiene services. These sell well, because they sound like they do something. ISPs are measuring bounces and non-existent addresses, so remove bouncing addresses and Voilà! Inbox Forever!
These services also claim to filter spamtraps. I actually got a real answer out of one of the companies about how many traps they had. The answer? Less than a hundred. Even worse, a client recently hired one of these companies to clean their list to get rid of a Spamhaus listing. The company identified ‘an inordinate number’ of Spamhaus spamtraps. Spamhaus tells me they saw zero difference in spamtrap hits before and after the cleaning.

What really works?

There is no trick to getting to the inbox. Theres’s no 5 steps or 5 tricks or 2 magic words you can use to get mail to the inbox. Like the magician’s tricks, they’re illusions. The folks selling you these tricks are hiding reality to make you see what you want to see. But the ISPs can see through the illusions and aren’t fooled.
Getting mail to the inbox means sending mail your recipients want and are delighted to receive. There’s no trick to this. There’s a lot of work to understand your audience, your product, your product lifecycle and your statistics. There’s work in creating copy and messages that resonate with your audience. There’s work in collecting permission from recipients. Email marketing is work and it’s skilled work.
Short circuit any of these steps and your mail may or may not make it to the inbox. Sometimes, tricks can get mail to the inbox for the short term. But those tricks let the ISPs identify you. Once they can identify you, they can block you.

Data Cleansing part 2

In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited email.
Poor research and a quickly written blog post led to me endorsing a company that I absolutely shouldn’t have. And I do apologize for that.
With all that being said, Justin had a great question in the comments of yesterday’s post about data cleansing.

Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

Organizational security and doxxing

The security risks of organizational doxxing.
These are risks every email marketer needs to understand. As collectors of data they are a major target for hackers and other bad people. Even worse, many marketers don’t collect valid data and risk implicating the wrong people if their data is ever stolen. I have repeatedly talked about incidents where people get mail not intended for them. I’ve talked about this before, in a number of posts talking about misdirected email. Consumerist, as well, has documented many incidents of companies mailing the wrong person with PII. Many of these stories end with the company not allowing the recipient to remove the address on the account because the user can’t prove they own the account.
I generally focus on the benefits to the company to verify addresses. There are definite deliverability advantages to making sure email address belongs to the account owner. But there’s also the PR benefits of not revealing PII attached to the wrong email address. With Ashley Madison nearly every article mentioned that the email address was never confirmed. But how many other companies don’t verify email addresses and risk losing personally damaging data belonging to non customers.
Data verification is so important. So very, very important. We’ve gone beyond the point where any big sender should just believe that the addresses users give them are accurate. They need to do it for their own business reasons and they need to do it to prevent incorrect PII from being leaked and shared.